Explore the Victoria and Albert Museum Online
The V&A is, of course, one of the world’s premier museums of design and decorative arts. They have recently announced that over a million items from their collections are now accessible online.
People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style… Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.
The example shown above is a board game from 1804 – “The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue.” It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children “to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride.” It is one of hundreds of games in the “games” category of the online collection.
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International Museum of Surgical Science
A trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago will make you glad you live in the modern world instead of the “good old days”! Wired has a gallery of exhibit photos ranging from a skull that belonged to a trepanation patient to early x-ray machines. Pictured is a vest used in 1899 to correct scoliosis. If this were posted as a “What Is It?” I would guess it to be an instrument of torture. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)
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Drive-In Auto Museum
Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements. Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.
The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand: on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car. The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.
Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)
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The Virtual Museum of Iraq
Six years after the invasion (and subsequent liberation) of Iraq, the country is still too dangerous for normal tourism. This is too bad since Iraq is literally a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts.
To accommodate armchair tourists too timid to risk life and limbs, the Italian government funded the creation of The Virtual Museum of Iraq, showcasing pieces dating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian eras and more.
Check it out: Link – via Neal Ungerleider’s True/Slant blog
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National Mustard Day
The first Saturday in August is National Mustard Day, sponsored and promoted by the National Mustard Museum. The celebration tomorrow will be in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, but afterwards the museum will move to its new home in Middleton, 18 miles away.
For the final time, people will gather here Saturday on two closed-off blocks of Main Street to celebrate National Mustard Day. There will be free hotdogs with mustard — there’s a $10 surcharge for those who dare to request ketchup — mustard painting and music by the Poupon U Accordion Band.
The Mustard Museum draws up to 30,000 visitors a year. Link to story. Link to Mustard Day website. -via J-Walk Blog
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Banksy's Secret Exhibition: Banksy Versus Bristol Museum
After years of pulling stunts on museums around the world, the guerrilla artist Banksy has gone legit. Somewhat. He’s pulled off his most audacious stunt yet: a secret exhibition in Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery.
In a rare statement Banksy said: ‘The people in Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum. [...]
He added: ‘This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my ictures up rather than scrape them off.’
The exhibition – called Banksy Versus Bristol Museum – consists of more than 100 items and will run for three weeks.
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The Smithsonian By The Numbers
The following is reprinted from Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again
Ironically, the Smithsonian came into being as a bequest to the United States by British scientist James Smithson, who had never visited the United States himself (while alive, anyhow - see below). Here's a glimpse of this All-American institution, courtesy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: 0 - Number of bag lunches you're allowed to take into the Smithsonian. Collectively, there are more than 20 sit-down restaurants among the Smithsonian museums, not counting outdoor courtyard grub. 2 - Percentage of the Smithsonian Institution's holdings on display at any given time. 3 - Number of one-cent stamps affixed to the first piece of mail flown across the Atlantic, which is housed in the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum. 4.5 - Millions of botanical specimens housed by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History; this represents around 8 percent of all plants collected in the United States. 17 - Number of museums that make up the Smithsonian. Among others, these include the American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Asian art), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery (modern and contemporary art), and - whew! - the National Museum of Natural History. 24 - Number of 2004 Smithsonian visitors, in millions. 25 - The number, in thousands, of Africana books in the institution's Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art. 32 - The number of huge, metal buildings dedicated just to restoring and storing aircraft on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and related centers. Smithsonian airplanes include the Enola Gay, the Wright 1903 Flyer, the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and the Concorde. 37.2 - Weight, in tons, of a section of Route 66 delivered to the Hall of Transportation in the National Museum of American History for a recent exhibit. 40 - Number, in thousands, of three-dimensional objects housed in the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, including Irish cut glass, Soviet porcelains, and Japanese sword fittings. The museum has more than 250,000 objects - drawings, prints, books, and textiles - all dedicated to the study of design.
75 - Number of years after the institution's namesake, James Smithson, died that Smithsonian regent, Alexander Graham Bell, brought Smithson's body from his place of death in Italy to a tomb at the Smithsonian Institution. 100,000 - Amount of money, in British pound sterling, that James Smithson originally willed to the United States upon his death in 1826. This eventually became the financial start of the Smithsonian. 7,635,245 - That same willed amount adjusted to reflect 2002 U.S. dollars. 78,000,000 - Visitors that the website, www.smithsonian.org [now www.si.edu - Ed], hosted in 2004. 143,500,000 - Approximate number of objects, works of art, and specimens in the Smithsonian Institution. |
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 | The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again. The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute
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You
haven't experienced American history until you've experienced the wonders
of the Smithsonian Institution. 
45.52
- Number of carats in the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Natural History. It glows in the dark after exposure
to UV rays and is semiconductive, too! If it truly belongs to the people
of America to enjoy, Mrs. Uncle John wants to know when it'll be her turn
to wear it out to dinner.
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Glass Botany
Preserved plants don’t look much like their living counterparts after they are flattened and dried. The Harvard Museum of Natural History instead has displays of plants made of glass!
Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 – 1936, three years before his own death.
Link to story. Link to more photographs at Flickr.
(image credit: Curious Expeditions)
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Miniatur Wonderland: World's Largest Model Railway
[YouTube - Link]
Miniatur Wonderland in Hamburg, Germany is the largest model railway in the world. With 7 miles of tracks in an area of over 16,000 sq ft, 200,000 people, 4,000 cars, 800 buildings, it features 6 geographic regions including America. It’s a work in progress (!) with a goal of more than 13 miles of tracks. The builders have already clocked in more than 500,000 hours of work.
This video is a presentation of this amazing attraction; make sure you watch the ’small’ control room @ 3:35.
From the Upcoming 
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The Toy & Action Figure Museum
Kevin Stark is an action figure collector, comic book artist and the curator of the Toy & Action Figure Museum.
Back in 2000 Stark convinced the Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, City Countil that they needed a tourist attraction and the toy museum would solve the problem. Five years later the museum opened its doors.
Inside is one of the largest action figure exhibits in the world, from a Star Wars display to a Batman shrine, the amount of figures the museum has on display outweighs its display space, meaning figures are on constant rotation so every character and creation gets it due.
Since opening in 2005 the museum has had visitors from every state in the U.S. and over thirty foreign countries, totaling over 40,000 visitors. Wired has gallery of pictures if you can’t go in person. Link
(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)
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Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum
Every inch of Marvins Marvelous Mechanical Museum's 5500 square feet of floor space with 40 foot ceilings containing an array of buzzing and clattering new and vintage mechanical devices and oddities. Overhead dangle signs, animatronic dummies, over 50 airplane models gliding along a steel rail, vintage fans of all types, and classic sideshow posters. Marvin himself travels the world looking for odd coin operated devices, both new and old. Some of his machines are custom made just for him, and can not be seen in operation anywhere else. Marvin's is also listed in the World Almanac's 100 most unusual museums in the U.S.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
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Ads for The Museum of Communism
The Museum of Communism in Prague has some delightfully funny advertisements. Don’t miss the posters featuring Stalin, Lenin, and Marx! Link -Thanks, bubu!
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